Business Google is shutting down Stadia - Google is refunding all Stadia purchases — hardware, software, and DLC. Members of the Stadia team will be “carrying this work forward” in other departments at Google.

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Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January.

“A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia,” Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison said in a blog post. “And while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.” Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company.

Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia’s technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed,” he wrote.

The writing has been on the wall for Stadia for a while now, most recently when Logitech announced its new cloud gaming handheld last week and Stadia was one of the few cloud gaming services not mentioned. But Stadia has been facing rumors of its demise practically from the start. Google has a habit of killing projects only a few years after they launch, and Stadia, a cloud gaming service from a company with few ties in the gaming industry, seemed like a prime candidate for an early demise.

Last year, rumors abounded it would shut down after the number of games released to the platform slowed and the company shuttered its in-house game development studios. When those rumors popped up again this year, Google insisted that Stadia was not shutting down. “Rest assured we’re always working bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro,” the company said in a tweet. Which was true... until today.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023 (Archive)
 
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They could have saved themselves millions and millions of dollars by simply getting a group of teenagers together, buying them each a copy of Fortnite and asking them if they thought Stadia was a good idea.

At least they're giving out refunds. That's pretty cool. But let's be real, this was all probably just a ruse to build some new kind of AI and harvest information from children.
 
The writing has been on the wall for Stadia for a while now
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Literally from the day it was announced. Everyone said this would be half-assed and dropped just like every other Google venture is half-assed and dropped.
 
Much like everything else with Stadia, it's death was delayed. I can't believe it lasted this long.
 
It took them long enough.

Matt Damon said:
Literally from the day it was announced. Everyone said this would be half-assed and dropped just like every other Google venture is half-assed and dropped.
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It's proof that they live in their own bubble, separated from the rest of the world. They thought that there was a market for something that requires a Silicon Valley level of lifestyle and Internet speed and quality.
 
The collapse of Western Civilization will happen when Google, for no obvious reason, announces that they are no longer supporting gmail starting tomorrow.
 
The cloud has always been retarded. Even for its original use, data storage. Local, offline storage is 169% better for everything. The cloud just means it isn't your data.

Adding in lag for this use just makes it double retarded.
 
1) I wonder how the refunds will be issued. I could see them issuing Play Store credit or something underhanded like that.

2) I bet a lot of the hardware won't be refunded because many of the people with controllers had them sent for free when they signed up for a Stadia Pro trial.

3) I've never been able to get a Stadia controller to work outside of Stadia.
 
Miller said:
It took them long enough.


It's proof that they live in their own bubble, separated from the rest of the world. They thought that there was a market for something that requires a Silicon Valley level of lifestyle and Internet speed and quality.
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Its not just that, they charged both full price for downloading games AND a monthly fee, which none of their competitors did. It was like the current XBL except far worse and thats not even getting into the limited game selection with zero exclusives.
 
Wasn't that new Cyberpunk DLC just announced for Stadia? Guess that's out the window now.
 
The Magnificence said:
I literally had never heard of Stadia prior to reading the above article.
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The only media coverage it ever really got was nearly universal mockery of the handful of Reddit soys who declared it the next big thing in gaming. Even the Consoom Product tech press could barely hide their contempt for the service.
 
Stabmaster Arson II said:
The cloud has always been retarded. Even for its original use, data storage. Local, offline storage is 169% better for everything. The cloud just means it isn't your data.

Adding in lag for this use just makes it double retarded.
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"The cloud" or using servers/far away computers to offload work is almost as old as silicon valley itself. The industry for some reason went through a cycle away from putting work on servers, to home computers, back to trying to promote this system once the internet became reasonably stable. But in it's current form it will not be capable of supporting something as necessary of supporting a quick reaction time as games, and I hope the death of Stadia rings the warning to all the other retarded companies trying to do this, to remove another point of ownership from the consumer.
 
I'm shocked ... that google is refunding everyone, never thought they would do the right thing but they did.
Here hoping stuff like Pixeljunk Raiders and Gylt can get ported to real platforms
 
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